Oven Barbecued Chicken and Cheesy Biscuits

Another "only so I can pin it" recipe!  This is one of the only recipes I still use from my Once-A-Month Cookbook.  Even though I love the idea of freezer cooking, I just didn't like enough of the recipes to stick to one of their plans; maybe someday I'll make a freezer cooking plan out of my own faves- except I always forget to thaw things early enough:(

2 1/2 lb chicken pieces
1/2C grated cheese
1C BBQ sauce
1 12-oz pkg buttermilk biscuits

Preheat oven to 400.  Coat 12x9 baking dish with nonstick spray.  Dip chicken pieces in bbq sauce.  Place them in pan; bake for 40-45 minutes.  Pile chicken pieces at one end of pan, separate dough into 10 biscuits.  Place them in the pan to drippings next to chicken.  Sprinkle cheese over biscuits.  Bake for 15-20 minutes until biscuits are golden brown.


Freezer version: the only thing that makes this "freezer" is that they freeze the chicken and cheese already portioned out in Ziploc bags.  Pretty darn easy!

Mimi at 7

I'd been asking Naomi for a few weeks what she thought she might want for her birthday.  She didn't have any ideas.

Until two days before her birthday.  Then she told me she wanted her ears pierced.

Hope and Chloe got their ears pierced together; I wanted Naomi and Lucy to get theirs done together too.  But since Mandy isn't visiting anytime soon, and David has vetoed my plans to go to Spokane at Thanksgiving, having the girls get their ears pierced together didn't seem very plausible.

So her birthday started out at Claire's.

She was pretty scared that it was going to hurt.  She's a bit of a baby, and when I pinched her earlobe to show her what it felt like, she cried.  A lot. 

After the first ear was done, she was going to start crying.

But she got herself under control and didn't even tear up.  With the second ear, she didn't even seem to care.  She was too excited looking at her ears!

After we left the mall, we went back to Byron for the ByronFest carnival!  It was hot and sunny, so I stuck to the shaded spots while the kids rode their rides.

 

 

There was a parade we were going to go to, but the kids were having so much fun on the rides that they didn't want to leave.

After the carnival, we went home to rest for a bit.  Naomi decided she wanted to open her presents and have cake.  She had requested Filled Cupcakes instead of a cake.  They were yummy, and they're already gone.  Apparently I'm not the only one who loves them!

Most little people took naps for a bit, and then we went to the river to go for a swim and a boat ride.  Joel even got to drive the boat.  I'm not sure we ever went straight, and a couple of times he turned the boat completely around; he thought it was fun to drive back over the wake.

Naomi said it was her best birthday yet!

Ideas to Help a Distractable Child with Schoolwork

I tear things out of magazines.  Articles, recipes, pictures, whatever catches my eye.

I'm trying to pare down my pile of ripped-out pieces of paper.

Hence, this post. 

Do we think Joel defines the word distractible?  He couldn't even stand still long enough for me to take this picture. 

From the time I said "say cheese" until the shutter engaged, he'd already decided he didn't want to bother remaining stationary.

Distractible

So that I can keep track of these fabulous ideas, I'm putting them here and Pinning them, rather than trying to keep track of one sheet of paper.

These are copied verbatim from an insightful author, Carol Barnier, in an article in Homeschool Magazine; because I can't find the article online anywhere, this is how I'm going to save it.

• Hand out math one problem at a time.  While you're working in the kitchen, take a small  piece of scrap paper and write a single math problem on it.  When he has done it correctly, he wads it up and shoots it into the basketball hoop (made from a hanger that you've hung in the kitchen)
• Go to the park.  Have him climb to the top of the slide, but before he can slide down, he has to spell five words correctly.
• Put the answers to math problems on 3x5 cards and spread them out on the floor. Read a problem to him and let him jump on the answers.  If you're doing multiplication, call out the answer and let him jump on the two cards that multiplied together create the answer.
• Do it on the whiteboard.  For reasons not fully explainable, problems of any sort done on a whiteboard are far less taxing than sitting at a table and working on paper.
• Instead of writing on paper, write spelling words in a tray of wet sand or across a nearly flattened bag filled with a bit of shaving cream.
• If you need for him to sit still and listen, you must give his hands something repetitive and mindless to do.  Taking corn off of a cob, one at a time with tweezers, separating puff balls by size and color using chop sticks, putting a large bowl of pennies into the small slot of a bank one at a time.  Mindless and repetitive. 
• Cake Walk your learning.  Put cards down on the floor in a way that creates a trail that circles back onto itself.  Start playing a fun song on your CD player while your student walks along the trail.  When you hit the pause button, to reveal his task he stops and flips over the card he's stepping on.  Maybe it's a math problem, a vocabulary word, a science question.  If he gets it right, the card is kept facing up.  But if it's incorrect, it goes back into play for review.  Keep playing till all the cards are up.  Remember, this is called "Cake Walk".  There's supposed to be a prize at the end.  Cake works, but so does a stick of gum.
• Toss a beanbag back and forth.  Any information that is linear in nature can be learned this way.  How about books of the Bible.  You say "Genesis" and toss the bag to your child.  She says "Exodus" and tosses it back.  This works for ABCs, skip counting, spelling of individual words, poems, pretty much any information with a beginning and an end.

Oh, I can see Joel enjoying each and every one of these activities.  Time to find some tweezers and chop sticks!